3rd building week - starting to see results!

Finally things are starting to come together this week... I'm starting to get more familiar with the machines and tools and methods of doings things. Putting together the first ball and socket joint, it works quite nicely already! (no rods soldered in yet, parts not cleaned up filed down yet, but still...) I have been working on all the different parts: drilling, cutting, sanding down and cutting tiny pins for my pivoting feather joints. Only found that the tapped holes for were slightly slanted, which makes that the plates don't fit accurately anymore... I was hoping to 'fix' this by making the bigger leading holes a bit wider, but noticed that the difference was too big... I had to remake the part and tap the threaded holes more straight this time.

I found another problem in the design of the wing joints this week as well. I had designed the end joint at the tip of the wing to have a ball joint at one point, with then a plate for the pivoting feather joints going in a corner/rounded edge around it. I found that I was actually over-complicating things unnecessarily here. Of course a joint with a ball on one side and a screw on the other side won't work... the tension of the screw on one side makes the plates to be opening on the other side and not spreading the tension equally. Filling up the gap at the screw side with metal could be a way to reduce this, but would just be a lot of extra work in this case. I could as well just make it a double ball joint and have the last feather - which would be quite an important leading feather anyway - attached to the rod coming from the ball joint. In this way it even increases the range of movement possible with this leading feather and make the design more straight forward...

All parts finished so far, still with the old design for the joint at the tip of the wing.

quickly sketching the new solution.

Next issue. I thought it would be a good idea to make the two plates together first including holes etc. and then cut the top clamping plate in half, to separate the ball joint and pivoting joint part. I found out that it was hard to saw through them neatly, and I was cutting away more then I wanted. So I decided to make the top plates again but now as separate strips, and line them up with the bottom one (I just drilled the middle hole first, to fit the screw through, so that I could clamp them together and then file away where not straight and drill the holes for the ball bearing sockets using the existing holes in the other plate as a guide).

Trying to saw through the plate, then deciding to make new strips.

New strips screwed to the bottom plate, before drilling the other holes through.

Some of this week's work.

I got as far as to putting most parts for the individual joints together. I got the pivoting joints for the individual feathers clamped between the plates. I already had some fear that these would still be giving issues. I would have had to work really neat and precise to get everything really straight and of equal thicknesses in order to have it all working smoothly. Indeed some of the metal strips were looser then others. When talking with Mary on friday she had the suggestion to try adding some sort of fabric/leather strip in between to see if this could help getting more equal friction for all of the metal strips.  I also found out after testing with the first strips that I would have to file away quite a lot at the top around the hole fitting on the pin in order for the strips to move far enough sideways and not get in the way of each other. Still much to improve...

Assembling the lower arm part.

All the parts together so far.